Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Singlish... guaranteed never to go extinct

In case you were wondering where Lianmei's speech pattern comes from, here's a quick quote from the Wikipedia entry on Singlish:

"The vocabulary of Singlish consists of words originating from English, Malay (mainly Bahasa Melayu rather than Indonesian), Hokkien, Cantonese, and to a lesser extent various other Indic and Sinitic languages, while Singlish syntax resembles southern varieties of Chinese. Also, elements of American and Australian slang have come through from imported television series. To date, other Asian languages like Japanese, Korean and other lesser known Chinese dialects such as Shanghainese have also been incorporated into Singlish."

It's interesting that Singlish is referred to here as a creole language - a "stable language that originates seemingly as a 'new' language, sometimes with features that are not inherited from any apparent source, without however qualifying in any appreciable way as a mixed language".

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